This invention relates generally to firearms and more specifically to a stabilizing support for a firearm, such as a bipod.
Shooters have long employed bipods (two legged stands) to lift the fore stock of rifles off the ground for level targeting when shooting in the prone position, freeing the non-trigger hand for other purposes. The bipod is sometimes used to prop the fore stock of the rifle when in other positions, like sitting or standing, behind an obstacle for concealment, or as a prop.
Bipod designs are ubiquitous. Most employ folding features where the bipod legs can be folded down (perpendicular to the barrel) when shooting and folded up (parallel to the rifle barrel) for storage or stowage. Various spring detente features are employed that fix the fold locations. Most bipods also employ various means to alter an adjustable length of either of the two legs to accommodate different shooting angles of muzzle elevation (angles from rifle butt to muzzle), ground horizon inclines (angles from the left hand to the right hand positions of the shooter, which are perpendicular to the rifle barrel), and combinations of these, to allow the shooter to maintain the rifle optical sighting scope axis and barrel axis in the vertical plane for accurate sighting of the target, wherever it might be.
The bipods usually attach to the underside of the rifle fore stock and usually employ a pivot feature to allow the shooter to make small adjustments in the sight picture without changing the position of the bipod legs, or the resting position of the bipod feet on the ground. Some rifle manufacturers have attached an appendage to the rifle receiver itself, eliminating the fore stock altogether, or free-floated the barrel, to which appendage a bipod may attach in a forward position near where a bipod would attach on a fore stock, if there were one.
Prior art bipods that allow adjustment of projectile trajectory without moving the contact points between the bipod legs and the supporting ground generally place a pivot location on the underside of the rifle. This allows the rifle to tilt to the left or right about the pivot point, which creates an inherent instability associated with the preferred central position. The unstable center position causes the rifle to behave like an inverted pendulum, tending to fall precipitously either to the left or to the right under the influence of gravity, and requiring the shooter to apply stabilizing forces to the rifle. Thus, the most stable positions under the influence of gravity are when the rifle is fully tilted to one side or the other at the maximum travel allowed by the pivot mechanism. When the rifle is oriented in a tilted side position, the rifle sight and barrel axis do not lie in a vertical plane. This results in bullet trajectories that do not lie in a vertical plane, causing the bullet to fly either too far to the right or too far to the left. Moreover, when shooting at very long ranges, the time it takes to acquire and track the target if moving can be long, making steadiness of the sight picture progressively more difficult as time goes on.
There remains a need for new firearm support system designs that are inherently stable under the influence of gravity.
All US patents and applications and all other published documents mentioned anywhere in this application are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
Without limiting the scope of the invention a brief summary of some of the claimed embodiments of the invention is set forth below. Additional details of the summarized embodiments of the invention and/or additional embodiments of the invention may be found in the Detailed Description of the Invention below.
A brief abstract of the technical disclosure in the specification is provided as well only for the purposes of complying with 37 C.F.R. 1.72. The abstract is not intended to be used for interpreting the scope of the claims.